


discontinuity

by thumbipeach



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post 73 feels, barely edited barely thought out healing, im here for you okay, its fine, please help me, we’re all fine, you all are welcome please enjoy as I sob into my pillow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:01:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28245861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thumbipeach/pseuds/thumbipeach
Summary: Somewhere, sometime, something fractures.“I wish you weren’t the same as me.”
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 18
Kudos: 82





	discontinuity

**Author's Note:**

> Shoulders Back—Honest Men  
> (Submarine)—Smallpools

  
If he wishes to wake in the middle of the night, retreat to his studio, and do nothing but forge his fingers into his temples, that is nobody’s right save for his own.

And when she finds him after oblivion, he is doing just that. 

His studio is the same as it always is. The only difference is the boyish devil within, cradling his head in his hands.

Soft creams for walls and downy browns for carpet. Lamplight burns low down to the kerosene origin, and flickers across his form, pallid as moonlight and listless in his chair. It doesn’t smell like paint, and mint, and flowers, like it usually would. It doesn’t feel like a home, like his blessed prison, his compass rose. It doesn’t feel like anything at all.

Lauren would like to believe she has mastered the art of wordlessness. After all these years of knowing and loving him so well as to have mapped his very instincts, she should have the grace to flit in and out of sight of his mind already.

But he knows her better. He can feel her presence like a boulder dropped in still water. It ripples even his static senses and charges an emotion he’d be loathed to name.

Kieran looks up when she enters. She makes no noise, but her form is deafening as midnight. He doesn’t seem to register her at all.

At first, she doesn’t say anything. Neither does he. And that is the difficult comfort, of glass silence.

She’d first noticed his absence from their bed with the latent groan in the air. His departure often held no cue, labored breathing shallow in trained silence. Even now, in grief, he was invisible as an assassin.

She wasn’t awake to catch the pacing he’d done, worrying tracks into the carpet; nor the stressed hands running through his hair, the phantom pains on his chest and neck. But she had jolted with the creak of the door, the slits of light now bleeding through the cracks. She had noticed the sheets soaked with sweat, the wrinkles and creases where he’d tried not to wake her up with his grievances. And because she always would, she set out to find him, wading through a blinding hallway down to where she knew his north was, where his compass would always land.

She quirks an eyebrow, a noncommittal plea for explanation. But Kieran only shakes his head, buries his face in his fingers. They’re long, bony, and something about them is unfocused. _He_ is unfocused: jittery and unsettled in a still night.

He can hear the hush of her nightgown, and when he lifts his head again her pink palms stare back at him, contrasting harshly on mahogany wood. He hears nothing, only feels in his throat the knock of a whip, the bristle of a band, a whispered promise to all that had forsaken him that he would try. He hears nothing.

His face contorts, and she feels the rip of her heart like a laceration. 

_”Hey_ ,” she tries, soft as though she were trying to talk down a scared animal. She presses her hands to his, seeking out the warmth she knows is there—his hands are always, always warm—

There is a point of boiling.

He snatches them away, cradling them to his chest as though she’d burned him. 

_“Don’t,”_ he pleads, baritone ragged. His voice sounds desperate, like a starving boy who’d just refused himself food.  
  
  


_“Please.”_

Lauren hesitates.

Then, slowly, lethargically, she sits down in the chair across from him. Sets her arms on the armrests, crosses her ankles and looks at him dead on.

He’s still clutching his hands to his sternum, as though if he let them go, they’d do something reckless, run away and leave him singed. Lauren wonders what kind of restraint he’s laid claim to: to deny himself help and healing, to keep his pain close as he would a lover.

“Kieran.” She says softly, voice as gentle as she can make it. He looks up, because her voice is a cold, solid beacon in a tempestuous storm, of his making, his choosing, his legacy.

She sits asymmetrically, milky white nightgown draping in pleats down her wrists and shins, encasing her in angelic discourse. He wonders if he will ever stop finding his way back to her. He wonders if she will simply stop, one day, and leave him dying on the tracks.

“Go back to sleep, darling.” He says, too worn to tease. He makes a determined effort to avoid her piercing gaze, eyes darting to the papers still on the desk, the bookshelves lined with matte green and red spines. He does not look at his drawings. He does not look at her. He dares not touch her.

“Why?”

“Why?!” He says, and it feels as though he’s shouting, voice echoing where his whisper makes no noise. _“Go back. I’m not—“_

“Not going to allow me to question you?” She intones blithely, sliding into his defenses smooth as an intruder. He winces.

_“Kieran,”_ She says again, even quieter, even softer, if it’s possible to be. With him, anything is made possible. 

He finally meets her eyes. Raw, cold azure, like uncut crystals, nearly steals her breath. He cries no gemstones, bequeaths no jewels, and yet there is a visible part of him missing, a palpable chasm she will fall into if she’s not careful.

“Are you okay?”

Kieran opens his mouth, preparing to lie. She can see the delicious syllables forming in his tongue, the way his dishonesty sounds so sweet. She hates it. Even as she loves him, she hates him. Hates this part of him, that makes him this way.

He’s smart. He knows better. He closes his lips and tries again.

“If I say yes, will you go back to sleep?” He says instead, pitiful, embarrassingly petulant.

She smiles, tilts her head in mockery. “Have you ever been able to tell me what to do?”

His eyes widen, and she feels a significant amount of triumph at the slip of a smile playing about his lips, just for a fleeting moment. 

“No. I have not.”

“Then?” She asks. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He shakes his head, looks down at his desk, at his hands. She sees now that they are trembling. She starts. 

He’s _trembling._ His skillful, sure fingers are shaking, agitated like autumn leaves, and she doesn’t know what to do to still them. What should she _do?_

“Talk to me,” she implores. 

He shakes his head again. He looks silly, she thinks, refusing her continuously like this.

“I don’t want to burden y—“

“Don’t finish that sentence, so help me _god.”_

“You don’t _know!”_ He growls. “You don’t _know,_ Lauren!”

_She doesn’t know how many times his lungs have shaken, how many times he’s asked for some kind of salvation. She doesn’t know of the tissues and the clots and the sores, the power he’d so desperately needed that did not come. She doesn’t know how weak the man she loves is. She doesn’t know._

She goes silent. Finally, perhaps he’s offended her enough for her to leave him here, bleeding. Perhaps it would be his greatest accomplishment.

Then, she speaks again, and her voice is as tremulous as his wrists. 

“I don’t know?” 

He shakes his head. “I can do this, I’m _fine—“_

_“Are you?!”_ She blurts, throwing her hands up in the air in exasperation. _“Are you really?”_

_“Am I lying to you?”_ He sneers. He wonders where the energy to do this came from, where he got the will to fight.

“No, but I—“

“I’m _fine!”_ He stands, planting his palms flat on the desk, papers crunching like dead flowers underneath them. It’s fruitless, useless—they still shake, they still shake.

“I can _do_ this! I am—“

“Kieran—“

“I can keep going!” He shouts, and it finally disperses the tension like snapping a guitar string. They both realize with cold, icy clarity, that they are near screaming at each other.

She sits down gingerly, hands clasped so tightly to turn them red.

“...you don’t really believe that,” she says incredulously. It’s not a question.

Her eyes are wide, gold, sparkling with imperfection, and even now, he loves her more than he could love anything more precious, more rare. He loves her so much to fight himself for her, fight for her, because that is his right, his tradition.

**“I do.”**

She smiles. Finally, she’s caught him in the trap. He is the dreaded wolf, and his leg is mutilated by her teeth, time and time again.

“You—“ she shakes her head slowly, red hair cascading down her shoulders. 

“You are such a dichotomy.” She breathes, almost amused. 

His is her dichotomy, her displeasure. Her disinterest, her dishonor.

Her discontinuity in a life of full stops.

Worlessly, almost bonelessly, he falls again, back bowing in his chair. His face is painfully blank, body wracked with inactivity.

Again, in a ritual familiar to them both, she brings up her hands. Sets them palm up, facing him. Asks him a question with no words.

He looks down at her pink fingers, calloused from her weapons and walls, bird-like in juxtaposed delicacy. He looks at what keeps him going.

“I do know.” She says.

_She does know. She has broken, bruised, cauterized and screamed, she has driven her fist into the sand and kept going. She has walked on unsteady feet, ran on shattered knees. She has stood alone, and she will not allow him to do the same._

_She does know._

He stares at her for what feels like centuries, and yet she won’t get tired of the painting that is his expression when he gives in. 

He lays his clammy palms in hers, still blazing, blisteringly warm. Gentle at first. Then as she curves her fingers around, among and between his, his grip gets stronger, more sure, more confident, until he is squeezing them tight, forehead downcast between them. His hair falls in a show of crow’s down, and he is beautiful, so hopelessly beautiful. 

_“Please,”_ he whispers—like a ghost, a phantom. 

_Please, the boy asks, to the girl who knows him._

She gets up, grip still tight in his, and rounds the corner of his desk, until they are on the same side. She hesitates, assessing his composure, then slips away hastily. Before a whine of protest can sound in his chest she has drawn her arms around him, as though tethering him to himself, lest he lay adrift. 

He breathes in, out, a dreaded rhythm, and closes his eyes. He can feel the salve of her cold skin on his, cooling the sweat and calming the blood. She tucks her head to his neck, where the point of a scar reaches through cotton, and settles her lips against the zenith. She can feel his pulse, rounded and constant, thrumming with the pleasure that is life. 

He resists pushing her away; he resists the magnetic urge to bring her closer. He wants to hate what she does to him, wants to succumb to the delusion that he doesn’t want her to invade his every space. 

“I do know.” She says into his skin. “I do know.”

“Do you?” He asks sadly, head aching for her touch.

“I said it once, too.” He can feel her rueful smile on his body, and it brands him like an unheard scar. 

“I do know.”

He retracts a bleating sob, lodges it in his throat. But she hears, because that is where she resides. Right at his heart, seeing every disfigurement. Lauren Sinclair knows everything; always has.

“I wish you _didn’t!”_ He cries, and his hands reach up to grip her wrist, holding her to him, as though she’d be cruel enough to let him go. 

“I wish you didn’t know! I wish you didn’t have to feel this kind of pain—I wish you _weren’t like me_ —!”

He chants into the fabric of her gown, and she feels like screaming. She feels like shattering into millennia, into discontinuities that he will have to stick back together with glue and gold.

_“I wish you weren’t the same as me.”_

But she is, and they cannot elude that fact of nature. And so as the earth’s night unfolds, they cling to each other and make no more discontent. They stay together.

They weather the storm. The storm is their temper.

“Come back to bed,” she tries, after a while. And he nods into her sleeve, pressing to her like a lost child as she pulls him back in, encases him in covers soaked through with nightmares and cradles him to her chest. He feels her heart beat like a rabbit’s pulse, and takes his comfort in that. 

She knows. He knows. 

_Somewhere, a boy hangs from metal and dances across molten heat. Somewhere, a boy whispers into a cloth of blood and his own tears. Somewhere, a boy speaks to an empty crowd._

_“I have to keep going”_

_Somewhere, a girl cries into yellow fabric, spits her heart onto rubble and pavement. Somewhere, a girl stands in front of the mirror and holds her wrists back from splintering glass into her palms. Somewhere, a girl protests to anyone who would listen._

_“I have to keep going.”_

_Somewhere, sometime, something fractures._

_“You’re persistent, aren’t you?” He asks, heaving with exertion, blood on his lips._

_“I’m just like you,” says the reaper with a rose-gold pistol._

_She is just like him._

A discontinuity.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> What’s on the tin. Absolutely no thought was put into this. But I hope it brings you a modicum of comfort ❤️❤️ If you will excuse me, I am now going to stare at a wall.
> 
> Comments/kudos are my guiding light, my beacon in my storm <3
> 
> -thumbipeach


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